When people who do not understand the language of one another have a conversation, an interpreter needs to listen and translate a content uttered by a speaker. It is, however, very difficult to always prepare an interpreter, and speakers who do not understand the language of one another cannot have a conversation.
To solve this problem, there is provided a voice translation technique of converting an uttered voice into text using a voice recognition technique, translating the text into the language of a listener by machine translation, and displaying the translated text or reproducing a voice using a voice synthesis technique.
There is also provided a support technique in which even if people who use the same language have a conversation when one person is at a remote location such as a call center, a voice is converted into text by voice recognition and data to be recorded are automatically acquired.
In the above-described voice translation/voice conversation support technique, the accuracy of voice recognition is limited, a content different from that uttered by the user may be converted into text. If the incorrect voice recognition result is translated, an intention is not transmitted to the partner user, thereby disabling a conversation from being held.
Since a question and an answer to it are often repeated in a conversation between people, if a question sentence is prepared in advance, the questioning side may be able to solve the above problem.
Since, however, the answering side inputs an answer for the first time when the question is asked, the answering side cannot solve this problem. There is provided a method of inputting an answer using an alternative means such as a keyboard or handwriting input without using voice recognition. However, the user who is not familiar with an apparatus may make a mistake, and it takes time more than that for voice recognition. As a result, the user feels stress.
As described above, even if the user can transmit a short intention using the conventional voice translation/voice conversation support technique, it is difficult to smoothly continue a conversation.